Just two months after a federal judge told the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to clear through a huge backlog of Medicare claims appeals comes word from the agency that not only will it not be able to comply, but that the backlog will actually grow by the time it's supposed to have been eliminated.

According to published reports, HHS said in a recent status report to the court that it anticipates its 687,382-claim backlog to exceed more than a million by the end of fiscal year 2021, the timeline that the court had given it to eliminate the backlog.